IN Brief:
- Keysight EDA software and training will be available to European semiconductor start-ups and SMEs through EuroCDP.
- Tools cover RF and microwave circuits, electromagnetic and harmonic-balance simulation, high-speed digital design, and device modelling.
- Design-data management adds version control and IP reuse to the platform’s shared semiconductor design infrastructure.
Keysight Technologies has joined the European Chips Design Platform, adding its electronic design automation software and training resources to the infrastructure available to European semiconductor start-ups and small and medium-sized companies.
The agreement with the Chips Joint Undertaking brings Keysight tools for RF and microwave circuit design, electromagnetic simulation, harmonic-balance analysis, high-speed digital design, and device modelling into EuroCDP. Models can be correlated with measurement data, while the package also includes training and design-data management for version control and intellectual-property reuse.
EuroCDP is a cloud-based platform established under the European Chips Act to reduce some of the cost and infrastructure barriers facing smaller semiconductor design teams. EDA licences, computing resources, specialist models, and contractual arrangements all have to be in place before a company can progress from architecture towards a verified design.
Those costs arrive particularly early in semiconductor development. A fabless start-up can require circuit simulation, physical-design tools, process design kits, verification software, IP licences, revision control, and substantial computing capacity well before its first device has reached fabrication or generated revenue.
Keysight broadens the platform particularly in analogue, RF, and high-frequency design. Those disciplines require simulation of effects that extend beyond individual transistor behaviour, including electromagnetic coupling, transmission structures, package interaction, nonlinear response, and high-frequency parasitics.
Romano Hoofman, general manager of EuroCDP, said: “EuroCDP is a key initiative lowering the entry barrier for new fabless companies.”
Correlating models with physical measurement data is especially relevant where small discrepancies can alter the behaviour of an RF or microwave circuit. A simulation environment has to represent not only the active device but the surrounding layout and interconnect closely enough for design decisions to remain useful once hardware is built.
Design-data management addresses a different problem. Semiconductor projects accumulate successive model files, IP revisions, simulation setups, layouts, and verification results, often across multiple organisations. Version control becomes an engineering requirement because a team must be able to establish which combination of design artefacts produced a particular result.
EuroCDP is developing a wider route through those dependencies rather than acting solely as a software catalogue. Work involving Racyics and Cloudberry has already linked the platform with design enablement, foundry access, IP, and early-stage financing for European fabless companies.
Keysight’s addition fills another part of that infrastructure. Smaller design companies can gain access to established tools without each organisation independently assembling the same software and compute environment before its design has been tested commercially.
The shared model does not remove the harder semiconductor-development decisions. Companies still have to select architectures and process technologies, choose IP, complete verification, plan packaging and test, secure manufacturing capacity, and establish whether a market exists for the resulting device.
It can, however, reduce the amount of capital and engineering time spent building the surrounding design environment. That is particularly relevant to analogue and RF companies, where specialised simulation and measurement correlation may be required before a prospective customer or investor can assess whether a design is technically credible.
The agreement also illustrates the distinction between semiconductor manufacturing policy and semiconductor design capability. Additional European fabrication capacity creates somewhere to manufacture devices, but it does not automatically create companies able to produce verified designs for those processes.
EuroCDP is intended to strengthen that earlier part of the development chain. Adding Keysight’s RF, electromagnetic, high-speed digital, and modelling tools gives participating design teams another established route from circuit concept towards a design that can be checked against both simulation and measurement before the expense of fabrication begins.
